Toy Technica: a brief look at toys through the ages

At the close of this last full holiday shopping weekend before Christmas, we …

Every Christmas, one or several "must-have" toys appear (or rather, disappear) on the shelves of retailers. Most of us can rattle off a few recent examples: Cabbage Patch Kids, Tickle Me Elmo, Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers or the Razor scooter. Then there are this year’s hottest items: the by-no-means-just-for-kids XBox 360 and the disturbingly sentient doll known as Amazing Amanda.

While the diversity and sophistication of toys has surged in the past half-century or so, children have entertained themselves with toys since prehistoric times. The earliest examples of toys were for the most part quite basic, and scholars oftentimes have difficultly determining if they were, in fact, toys. A stone statue of a horse is one observer's toy, while for another observer it's a cult item. This can be quite troublesome for any kind of device as well as for things such as dice, which some scholars would argue were used for divination. Only when we find items buried with what appear to be children can we begin to make guesses about prehistoric toys.

Still, a good number of remarkable toys from ancient civilizations have either survived and/or are mentioned in writing. Several ingenious Egyptian toys, roughly 4000 years old, are known to us. Below is a set of four miniature ivory figures on a stand which "dance" by means of strings threaded through the stand. Dating to the Middle Kingdom, such a toy would have been the property of a very wealthy family.

Pharaoh's version of Dance Dance Revolution.

Other figures animated by means of a string survive, such as a man working over a board (exciting!) or a frog whose mouth opens and shuts (images found here). Egyptian children (and likely adults as well) also played a variety of board games. But instead of Chutes and Ladders, an especially popular game was "Dogs and Jackals." (Board games were used by the Sumerians two millennia before, for those of you keeping track.) In China, they were flying kites by 1000 BCE, and likely even several centuries before then.

During the Roman Empire, a wide variety of toys existed: dolls made of cloth or wax (sometimes with movable joints), wooden swords, hobby horses and stilts. In addition to board games, many Roman children played a dice-like game with knucklebones (from a sheep or goat). Each throw of four bones had 35 different scoring possibilities, with the lowest being a throw known as “the dog”. Speaking of dogs, Romans kept a number of animals as pets: dogs, cats, ducks, geese, mice, and for the especially privileged children, monkeys.

Christmas meets industrialization

It is only with the increasingly popularity of Christmas in the late 19th and early 20th century, however, that the manufacturing of toys becomes a serious commercial industry. The most sought after toys of the first half of the 20th century included Crayola crayons, Raggedy Ann dolls, the ViewMaster, and the game Candyland.

Nevertheless, the toy industry was revolutionized in 1977 with the release of "Star Wars." The Star Wars toys produced by Kenner represented the most significant tie-in of a line of toys with a movie, and interest in the toys increased because of their initial scarcity. In fact, since large-scale production of the figures was not ready for Christmas of 1977, Kenner decided to sell empty boxes which could be redeemed for a set of four action figures to ship several months later. The demand for the toys was unprecedented, and the Star Wars phenomenon gave rise to the great action figure Golden Age of the 1980s, where Star Wars, G.I. Joe, and He-Man were the most popular, with the action figure craze even extending to the ancient Greek heroes of Clash of the Titans, Indiana Jones, the Lone Ranger, and Hollywood movie monsters. The figurines themselves were usually relatively inexpensive. At least, they were compared to the accoutrements they had, be it the Millennium Falcon, Castle Greyskull, or that freakin' huge G.I. Joe aircraft carrier (watch the commercials for a laugh).

The toys of the ancient world may lack the swivel-arm battle grip, voice chips, or sheer variety of the present day toy industry, and may seem world's apart from what kids are begging for this year. Yet it is clear that the desire to play (for both children and adults) is a universal one, and the ancients devised many clever toys for which the basic forms have changed very little over thousands of years. Whether it's dolls in your hand or "dolls" in a computer-generated image on screen, the aliens who catalog earth's history in 5000 years will see much of it as the same thing.

What were the toys that you recall desperately wanting for Christmas, Hanukah, or Festivus? Were any of them ingeniously simple? Pointlessly complex? Extra geek points for those of you who post pictures in the discussion!

Ken Fisher / Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation.